zzle of
the other's apathy.

Later in the day she knocked timorously at his study door. She had come
with a silly little proposition that he let her take the infant and go
South as if to join Isabel. Thus the trunk would not lie in the express
office down there, unclaimed and breeding awkward inquiries, and she
from that point, with him at this, could keep up the illusion they had
invented until Isabel herself should--eh--return!

But when he let her in, he stood before her a silent embodiment of such
remorse and foreboding that she could have burst into sobs and cries.

Yet she broached her plan, trembling visibly, while he heard her through
with melancholy deference.

In reply he commended it, but called to her notice how much better it
would be for her to go alone. Then the babe, left behind, would be an
unspoken yet most eloquent guarantee that its mother would soon
reappear.

"Very true," responded the emboldened lady; "yet on the other hand"--

He put out an interrupting touch. "The child is as safe with me as if it
were in its mother's bosom."

"Oh, it isn't so much a question of safety as"--

The father interrupted again, with a gleam in his eyes like the
outflashing of a knife. "I hold the child against all comers, and would
if I had to slay its mother to do it."

Mrs. Morris stifled an outcry and would have left him, but he would not
let her.

"Stay! Oh, listen to a soul in torment! The babe is already motherless.
Isabel can never return, mother; she is with the dead. I am not waiting
idly here for her; I am waiting busily--for her slayer. He has fled; but
when he sees he is not pursued he will come back to the spot,--to the
black, black hole. He cannot help it. I _know_ that. Oh, how well I
know it! And the moment he comes he is caught,--caught in the web of
proofs I am weaving!"

He held her arm and gazed into her gazing eyes in ferocious fear of the
web she might be weaving for him; while she, reeling sick with fear of
him, tried with all her shaken wits t

Martha Finley (1828 - 1909) was a teacher and author of numerous works, the most well known being the 28 volume Elsie Dinsmore series which was published over a span of 38 years. The daughter of Presbyterian minister Dr. James Brown Finley and his wife and cousin Maria Theresa Brown Finley, she was born on April 26th, 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio. Finley wrote many of her books under the psodonym Martha Farquharson. She died in 1909 in Elkton, Maryland, where she moved in 1876.

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